“America is a land in which one can be employed by Boeing or Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics,” said HRH, “and in that employment be hired and paid for only one purpose. The sales and development of weaponry dedicated to the eradication of Muslim flesh. The more Mohammedians that one kills, the greater the rewards. Endless wealth! A rise in society! Invitations to the best galas! Come and find me in the golden hour of cocktail reception at the Saudi embassy. The drinks are, alas, without alcohol, but I am waiting and watching for you.”
The astral projection of HRH began to shimmer.
“Pray, madame, do not think that the blessed war industry would exclude you on the basis of your fairer sex. Four of the five major American defense contractors are headed by women CEOs resolute in their dedication to massacre. When America bathes in the splattered excreta of Musulmans, the country is nothing but liberté, égalité, and sororité. Yes, madame, you also could build those bombs and you too could work towards the complete obliteration of the Saracens. Not one eyebrow raised! The world will be yours! I myself have had the pleasure of a healthy conversation with Marillyn Hewson following her triumphant acceptance of an Edison Achievement Award. She was touched to the core when informed that both my father and myself are shareholders who follow her good works. Extinguish enough lives and they will reward you with a profile piece in the Style section of the New York Times. Beau Brummell for the Blackwater generation! The pantsuits and pumps that power the putrefaction parade!”
The astral projection of HRH started to disappear.
“I take my leave,” said HRH. “I must make quickest haste! America will not scold or shame you for the mass manufacture of weapons with no possible function other than wholesale slaughter. Feel free to murder tens of thousands. Carte blanche! More filthy lucre for The Conqueror!”
HRH disappeared.
His voice came in a final paragraph:
“Yet if you wish to maintain your position as a resoundingly fêted killer of the distant peasantry, then there is one mistake that you must never make. Never consume Zolpidem and power up your smartphone. For if you do, madame, perhaps you will discover the truest meaning of in vino veritas. What if, in your drugged haze, you log on to Twitter and refer to your victims with an unfortunate slur? The social and corporate structure of America longs for tsunamis of Mohammedian blood. Yet the human resources department will have zero tolerance for the scourge of online Islamophobia. Kill them all, O my elfen dearest, but never call them Ragheads! In America, the entire society will scrape and bow before your bloody conquest. But no one will ever thank you for your honesty.”
About the Author
Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA, a psychedelic biography of the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, was an unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. His novel I Hate the Internet was a bestseller everywhere, doing especially well in Serbia. His follow-up novel, The Future Won’t Be Long, wasn’t a bestseller anywhere but did receive a shortlisting for the Literary Reveiw’s 2017 Bad Sex in Fiction Award and was published in the United States by a company that printed propaganda for Nazi Germany. So there’s always hope.
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Praise for Only Americans Burn in Hell
“In this ingenious mess of a novel, with all the bullshit paranormal characters that a superhero-habituated modern audience requires, Jarett Kobek clearly and calmly explains our genocidally idiotic mess of a culture as it plunges enthusiastically into a genuine, non-fictional damnation that Batman isn’t going to rescue it from. Brilliantly funny and sociologically terrifying, Only Americans Burn in Hell is the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last. Read it while you’re still neurologically capable.” Alan Moore
“This time Kobek has called all of his own craziest bluffs and rocketed straight over the ionosphere, into sheer blue sky and beyond—this book breathes in outer space. One wishes the phrase ‘takes no prisoners’ had been saved for when we’d need it. If you don’t find yourself busting a gut laughing, then you’re probably still in denial of how deeply you feel implicated.” Jonathan Lethem
“Jarett Kobek’s books are an attempt to explode what the novel could still be, as radical as Samuel Richardson or Laurence Sterne’s attempts to define what it was in the first place. Only Americans Burn in Hell is a fantasy work about mythic Amazons time-travelling to modern America of the type currently clogging multiplexes—but one infected by anxieties about sexual politics, the ethics of the digital world and the horrorshow of the Trump administration. Kobek makes you laugh and think at the same time, engaging both the head and the gut.” Stewart Lee
“Only Americans Burn in Hell is a smoking hot and hilarious dissection of why the world is in such a mess right now. While you watch Jarett Kobek pour gasoline on everything—international politics, Internet culture, the book business, American presidents, Christianity, capitalism, the fantasy genre—you will be so mesmerised and laugh so much that your faith in humanity will be restored by the time he lights the match. Jarett Kobek is one of our most groundbreaking writers.” Dorthe Nors
“There’s a chance that when the dust settles on the cultural and political insanity of the early twenty-first century, only one writer will remain relevant: Jarett Kobek. With scathing wit, shocking insight and brutal honesty Kobek demolishes social media and the publishing industry, introduces us to a Saudi Prince hopped up on DMT, and conjures perhaps the most important and hilarious fairy story ever written.” Ivy Pochoda
“To think of Jarett Kobek as merely (‘merely!’) an American Houellebecq would be sorely to miss the point. His energy, intellect, wit, sensibility, erudition, tenderness, and—yes—obnoxiousness add up to something wholly original, and absolutely necessary. Only Americans Burn in Hell extends the vibrant, reckless critiques offered by I Hate the Internet into our present moment, and perhaps a little bit beyond: one reads it with a sense of elation, gratitude and relief that someone is saying these things out loud. So far as that goes, Kobek may be the only contemporary American novelist who matters.” Matthew Specktor
ALSO BY JARETT KOBEK
ATTA
I Hate the Internet
The Future Won’t Be Long
Do Every Thing Wrong! XXXTentacion Against the World
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
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